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In business, few rules can truly stand the test of time. Ironically, one such rule is that you should always brace for change. This change can take you to unexpected places and sometimes cause you to uncomfortable decisions like changing the very core identity of your business.

When the time comes to change the party line, are your B2B marketers prepared?

Without a doubt, B2B marketing is a prime source of revenue. It’s become more than a way for companies to pitch products to potential customers. Whether it is a door-to-door sales or online advertising, it’s a medium of communication.

Yet in the recent years, there’s been a greater demand for unique (and unconventional) marketing campaigns that can attract even more elusive prospects. For example, sometimes the marketing department alone won’t be enough to execute a marketing strategy. Sometimes you bring in even the CEO himself both in terms of advertising as well as casting his life as an industry thought leader.

Ever been in a situation where you had to make up the rules of something as you go along? You might’ve done it during a long road trip or when trying to past the time. However, the longer version of that actually happens during your lead generation campaign.

For example, say you’re using a mix of content and event marketing to drive prospects into your lead generation process. You present a new technology or practice that’s been shaping up the office world lately. (It could be a new HR system, EMR integration, or even just a new style of organizational structure.) However, you’re also well aware of some of the problems people run into when implementing it and thus make suggestions on how to avoid them.

With an age of information comes the race to capitalize it and at the same time, share the benefits of doing so. Yet unfortunately, that’s not usually the picture people have about it these days. Instead, everything from the most harmless lead generation campaigns up to your average government survey is viewed as suspect. “Privacy is dead” cry so many advocates.

Yet because out of fear of offending any such advocates (whether they’re in the telemarketing lists or among blog subscribers), many companies undermine their lead generation efforts.

One could say that being an intern could be the worst and lowest possible position you can get in a company. (If you can even call it job position. After all, interns are still technically in school.) And since it’s been some time since school started, what are the odds of running into interns during your telemarketing campaigns?

Ours is the age high tech information. However, this has plenty people fearing for the future of humanity. As of 2013, today’s average attention span has shrunk down to eight seconds. You can already hear it now. “Nobody reads anymore.” “Kids don’t appreciate fine attention to detail.” “Technology makes us dumb.”

This may sound sagely at first but you shouldn’t adopt this sort of thinking for your email marketing campaign. Why? It’s because it’s an excuse. This makes it easy to shift the blame of bad marketing to something you think is beyond your control.

Yet, by thinking this way you are making prospects and customers the real victim.

Not all marketing experiments are corporate invasions of privacy. On the other hand, sometimes experiments themselves need to be utilized within the private confines of your own organization. This extends to the ones you do on the internet.

Ask yourself, how do you expect to improve your B2B marketing strategy if you’re not testing out your ideas? Everything can sound all too good in theory. You’ll have to put it into practice and it may not be worth wasting more of your marketing dollars in case something goes wrong.

For the internet, Independence Day can mean one or two things. You had the regular 4th of July but you also have the 1996 movie of the same name. And with constant rumors of a sequel, it’s not a film that’s easy to forget.